My Week in Texas

March 12, 2012 in Business Management, Fortress ITX with 3 Comments

What a whirlwind week! I can confirm this: Texas has the best BBQ ever! That AND the people of this state are extremely friendly. We’re proud and excited to call Dallas our new home with a brand new datacenter and sales office in the heart of the Arts District (more information to come soon).

Here’s a play-by-play:

March 4, 6 p.m. – Arrived in Dallas after an uneventful flight. Went immediately to the new office downtown, and I’m ecstatic to report that it is accessible! The highway runs right by the building, the bus stops just a block away, and parking is a breeze. Setup is complete and our sales engineers are hard at work. Our space is soaring on the 21st floor. Check out the view:

Sales Engineer Hard at Work in Dallas

Account Executive Jamison Powell and Our Outstanding Dallas View

March 6, 9 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. – It became official: we moved into our Dallas office overnight. We set up phones, email, desks… We were home, asleep by 5 a.m. and then back to work the next day, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at 9 a.m. sharp. Phew!

Dallas Chop House Meat

Dinner at the Dallas Chop House

March 7, 8 p.m. – CEO Jason and I dined at the Dallas Chop House and boy, did we eat! I had a 12 oz. filet and a 10 oz. lobster tail; while Jay ate a third of his own body weight in N.Y. Strip Steak. Yum!

March 8, 7 p.m. – I’d like to note that I am extremely pleased about our new alliance with Digital Realty Trust, which manages the building and provides us with world class security and amenities. Our clients are going to be very happy when they come to tour the datacenter; as they’ve been with our five other facilities. We’re up to par in Dallas!

Digital Realty Trust Sales Senior Account Executive Michael Carnes took us to a fantastic Dallas Stars hockey game!!! We had awesome seats right behind the players, so, of course, we screamed ourselves hoarse…but not before we were able to thank Michael for all his tremendous work on our behalf. Digital Realty Trust is a class act, folks!

Fortress Crew at the Stars

Brandon, Jason and Michael at the Stars Game

March 9, 9 p.m. – Arrived in Austin for the South by Southwest Film and Interactive Festival (#SXSW). On the QT, our CEO, Director of Sales and I were there for another business venture: the launch of Firefly Expression Engine Hosting (more information to come soon). Let it suffice to say that Fortress will be powering this wave of the future with our exclusive, high-speed SAN technology and secure infrastructure. We’re joining forces with Paper Tiger, which is a partnership 15 years in the making. The launch party – at the exclusive Speakeasy on the Avenue – drew a crowd of 300, with another 900 people wait-listed to get in. It was intense! (And that’s all I have to say about that…for now.)

March 11, 7 a.m. – After losing an hour (up yours, Daylight Saving!), I boarded a plane back to our corporate headquarters in New Jersey. Glad to see my family after a week away, I was also excited to report back that – aside from the fact that I consumed what must have amounted to an entire cow during my visit to Texas (yum!) – our two new business pursuits are in full swing and already successful.

Go Fortress… go Fortress, go!

It All Starts With Family

February 20, 2012 in Family Matters with 0 Comments

It all starts with family. Family is everything. The reason I am where I am today was because I came upon a fork in the road at age 21 and decided that having my own family was important to me. Had I not made that decision, I would not be writing this today. So here I am. My wife and my two daughters mean everything to me. They truly are the light of my life and they make it possible to be as successful as I am in business and in my career. There are times though that being a family man is tough, really tough.

My wife and I put our 5 year old daughter to bed tonight at about 7:45pm and when we got to her room, we found an unspeakable horror. Upon entering the room, we were greeted by a horrific stench. This is the kind of stench you would imagine you would smell in one of those seedy gas station rest rooms or some portable outdoor carnival bathroom. The stench was urine, copious amounts of urine. At first we thought of the dogs. We have 2 10 pound miniature pinschers that are house trained and often have accidents in the various places around the house, however, this smell seemed pretty thick to be caused by a dog accident or two.

My wife let out a shriek as she lifted the edge of my daughter’s $300.00 rug, the side and corner completely soaked from top to bottom with piss. Now I have to say, as a parent, it’s incredibly frustrating to work your ass off to provide your children with nice things only to have them completely destroy those nice things. It reminds me of some of the horrible things I did as a child and that I should remember to call my mother soon to apologize for being such a little asshole all the time when I was a kid.  Upon hearing my wife shriek, my 5 year old darted into her closet to hide from the oncoming scorn. The damage to the rug can be seen above. This is a picture of the rug just before it spent the night in the trash can.

I returned to my 5 year old’s bedroom after delivering the rug to its cold dark grave and found my wife standing next to our daughter’s bed with a look of disgust. “She peed all over her floor and her wood floor is entirely ruined!”, she shouts at me. I walked over to my daughter’s makeshift toilet and looked around for other signs of bodily fluid vandalism while my wife scrubbed the floor with vinegar and paper towels.

My daughter has a canopy princess bed on stilts. It has a ladder, a slide and a big tent over the the top with windows and all. The ladder is in the middle of the room and the slide near the window that drops you off in the closet. Truth be told, the slide is a bit too big for the room but my wife and I are suckers and we love to get cute fun things for our kids. I was standing near the ladder when the scent of urine again entered my nasal passages. I took a closer look at the slide only to notice old dried pee starting at the top and proceeding down the slide. As my eyes carefully followed the trail of ruin from the top of the slide to the bottom, my mind began connecting the dots at how the rug debacle had taken place.

We sat my 5 year old down on her desk chair to ask her why she had done what she had done. She said, “I just thought my room was closer than the bathroom and I didn’t think it would smell…” though both my wife and I know that this was purely a story told in the moment to satisfy our inquisition. We both speculate that she thought the image of her urine running down the slide was funny and that’s more than likely why she did it.

So after an hour of scrubbing with vinegar, swiffering the floor, throwing out a rug and a baby doll crib, having our wood floor begin to protrude in a vertical direction and setting some new ground rules about water consumption after 7pm, we’ve learned a valuable lesson. Don’t assume that just because your child is potty trained that they understand the difference between a toilet and a slide.